What is Liveness Detection and Why is Everyone Talking About it?
Every day, there’s a new fancy term that’s thrown around and you wonder what sort of technological innovation is this now. Well, Liveness Detection is a key concept in the world of digital security, particularly for the fintech, KYC and other security agencies such as governments. Let’s first simply discuss what is Liveness Detection.
What is Liveness Detection?
Liveness Detection, as the name suggests, detects whether an individual is real, live and not a deepfake or manipulation. Wait, it gets easier to understand.
For example, you’re trying to log in to your bank account with face recognition. The camera not only detects your face, but an app powered with Liveness Detection will also detect that you’re actively trying to access the system. If it would only be restricted to your facial features, someone could get into your account by using a picture or video. Where does that leave the technology then?
Types of Liveness Detection (Active & Passive)
Liveness Detection providers have their own capabilities, based on their technology, solution prowess and scale of operations. Passive Liveness Detection is the simpler form, where all you have to do is to scan your face. Once scanned, the system will not ask for any further prompts and will either grant or revoke access based on its result.
Active Liveness is where you actively have to do something. Did you ever try to sign up for an app that asked you to perform gestures? And often you had to put the app down because you were around a few people and it got really awkward to keep rotating your neck. Well, these prompts are there to enhance the level of security. Your movement is detected with depth-sensing AI-driven technology to ensure that you’re a live individual.
If you want to continue exploring more, you can do it here.
What does Liveness Detection prevent?
Spoofing attempts! Liveness Detection is the perfect way to keep out spoofing attempts from fraudsters. Cyber criminals have technology too, and the the emergence of hyper-realistic masks allows them to impersonate people. Similarly, deepfake videos are also trending these days. I know we all loved the Paul Walker deepfake tribute, here’s a video of what they did but it’s actually really scary. Not only can they make a deepfake video of yourself and post it online, they can also use it to access your accounts and information.
Conclusion
We have kept this short for you to understand the basic concept of Liveness Detection. It has significant use cases in various industries, and as we further keep writing about it, we will dive deep into technical, ethical and legal aspects of Liveness Detection and face recognition technology.
